Three very successful Republican leaders were and are Governor George Pataki and Mayors Rudy Giuliani and Michael Bloomberg. Their success is due to their management skills more so than their ideological bearings. Don’t believe me? Well I was on the late William F. Buckley’s television show Firing Line in the 1990s and asked him if he believed the new recipe for success was management skills possessed by politicians rather than ideological orthodoxy. He agreed with me and his panelists, that included Peggy Noonan, Richard Brookhiser and Alan Keyes, seemingly concurred.
You must admit that these were not vacillating liberal pundits but strong conservatives who lacked the rigidity of today’s conservative politicians who seem more into being conservative for the sake of being conservative while lacking a fundamental understanding of the basic underlying philosophical tenets of conservatism.
Buckley did not get his news from the knuckle draggers at Fox News he read the New York Times and was open in his fondness for the paper. Today’s conservative politicians may snicker at this but let’s not forget that it was Buckley who propelled Republican icon Ronald Reagan into the White House.
Buckley was also an intellectual as opposed to today’s anti science Republicans. He was the first to make use of GPS and computer technology during his cross Atlantic sailings. He was anything but anti intellectual quite proud of his Yale pedigree and even fondness for playing classical music on the harpsichord actions that would draw disdain from today’s gorilla Republicans.
The management Republicans steered a course for success without the ball and chain of strict ideological rigidity the opposite of today’s Republicans who remain unpopular with the general voters unlike the management school standard bearers Giuliani, Pataki and Bloomberg. And that may foretell the outcome of the 2012 race against President Barack Obama.